Perfect Blindness
by Imbelossien
Summary: [ NejiSasu ] All your lives, you realize, both of you have said so many things you did not mean. All your lives you hurtled blindly.
1. Cut 1

**Perfect Blindness**

_**These Silences Story 3**_

- the 2nd story of a series I'm planning involving a singular theme, each featuring various pairings I happen to favor. I don't own Naruto, but I have shamelessly borrowed Kishimoto Masashi's characters, and at times liberally added some of my own little concoctions.

- this story contains implied **_yaoi_**, and if you are uncomfortable with this, please do us both a favor and stay away. I shall also be alluding to a lot of other works, which are duly credited at the end of this long one-shot. This is set ideally after the series is over, to which I would daresay is, for now, an AU, precisely because it hasn't ended yet. ; And I'm making my own conclusions, literally, but that's not exactly the point.

- set several years after the current things that are going on. Neji x Sasuke. **_SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS_**, please take heed, **especially if you don't read, or are not up-to-date with the manga.** If it doesn't matter, yey for you. :)

* * *

.

Whenever I'm alone with you

You make me feel like I'm free again

. - from "Lovesong" by The Cure

* * *

When people saw them together, people talked. It was something inevitable, really, given that they both belonged to the village's foremost families. That alone was cause for them to be put in some sort of pedestal, for them to bear the weight of the village's gaze; a collective, invisible nuisance that made the hair on Sasuke's neck prickle, and made Neji frown deeply in mild agitation. It was like a vexing, dark little imp that waited for them in every corner, that slunk down with them as they made their way down the avenue. It followed them when they made their way to the Hyuuga estates, and it followed them shamelessly up to the hill where the Uchiha ruins still stood.

It was a crow of praise that came from the acknowledging look of their teachers, whenever Gai, or Kakashi for that matter, encountered them in the street. The jounin at the mission desks and at the hospital had prying, inquisitive looks that betrayed the formality of their gestures and words. Their "teammates" (it was a standing uncertainty where both of them stood of course; neither one really took on missions with their cell as often as they should, and it was common for the administrative desks to receive requests slips from one, or the other, asking to be paired up for a particular mission) had gazes that perhaps said the most to them.

Tenten's held a pensive, suspicious question which Neji refused to answer. She had been asking him that for quite some time now, ever since she saw a most suspicious bruise that peeked just above Sasuke's typical bucket-neckline. From time to time, when she angled her head to one side and allowed her gaze to slide evenly towards the white-eyed jounin's direction, she threw her accusations like she threw her weapons: relentlessly, quietly, precisely.

Lee was thankfully not as susceptible as Tenten was to these things, but he did, in a most childish way, detest how Sasuke had come to occupy _his _supposed status of rival and companion. He didn't quite like how Sasuke had become Neji's finest sparring partner—Neji being, for Lee, a mark to be surpassed—because in Lee's clear-cut and simple logic, that meant that Neji would not take sparring, with anybody other than Sasuke, as anything close to serious. That increased the feeling of being played with for Lee, and nobody else perhaps saw how his large eyes narrowed a little in envy when he watched the two young men mock-fight behind the training grove.

Sakura didn't understand. Her green eyes would widen slightly in a silent barrage of incomprehension, always attempting to lock into Sasuke's avoidant ones when they met at the hospital for the bi-monthly checkup. She didn't understand why Sasuke allowed Neji to be in a place that she had, for the most part of her life, longed to be in—there, only a miniscule space away, a distance that teased and a distance that was telling of how one regarded the other.

_Sasuke-kun, why is Neji-kun always with you eve when you don't need a guard any longer?_ Or she would smile and invite them both to take a seat in the reception area, while quietly haranguing Sasuke, _Why is it that you seem happier today, Sasuke-kun? And why won't you let me help you?_ For this reason, Sasuke hated the bi-monthly checkups. He hated how distraught Sakura would seem at worst, and how he had to withdraw from eye contact, because he knew she would understand the moment she read into his look.

This was an irony that Sasuke disliked the most.

Nobody asked them outright though, even if, underneath the underneath, it was quite a clamour. Nobody asked because, Neji suspected, nobody wanted to _know_, even if their intentions clearly projected from their stares. Words uttered were just as amorphous and just as final, anyway. And there was something distinctly humanizing about hurling yourself and your soul out, out through to a single glance, and knowing that it would be met halfway by someone else's.

The Byakugan allowed Neji ingress into spaces that people normally kept to themselves: the intricate workings of the human body, the telltale space between heartbeats, the scrutiny of actions and idiosyncracies that probably said most about a person. It all felt like intrusion to Neji, and he often caught the guarded expressions of people in reaction to his white eyes. As if to tell him, _You can't see into me, Hyuuga. You and your ilk have eyes that don't understand what you're seeing_.

When he looked at Sasuke however, it was never an issue of trespassing. He had by now memorized the restless chakra that coursed through the Uchiha's veins, naturally unbridled but kept in check by a discipline that could only be self-imposed. Neji often thought, in the strangest hours in the morning, that if the paleness in his eyes regressed to blindness rather than omniscient vision, he would still be able to trace, like the intricate patterns of calligraphy, the little highways and byways that drew Sasuke's blood to the different parts of his body. He thought these things when he would awaken first, and see a dark head slumbering not too far away from his. He thought these things in silence, always aware of the manji that throbbed lightly on his forehead.

Attaining the Mangetsu Sharingan opened, as it were, a completely different sort of understanding in Sasuke. It allowed him to uncover his delusion layer-for-layer, in the remarkable way that the Sharingan had the ability to uncover genjutsu. It allowed him to see how deeply entrenched he was in _his_ own misleading search for strength. He had gotten quite adept at interpreting the thin film of cordiality that many of those he came into contact with erected in his presence. Beneath the formal greetings and the respectful nods, they still saw him as the village traitor, and _always_ refused to meet his eyes—perhaps afraid that he would do to them as he did to his brother, and as his brother did to his clan.

When Neji looked at him however, he felt relieved at not having to explain anything. Neji knew these things; and although Sasuke never asked him outright, he understood that the Hyuuga perhaps underwent a similar moment of clarity once, long ago. When Neji looked at him, and when he looked right back, the Sharingan turned not because it needed to see through anything—they turned because they had a new "special condition" for which to turn. When he looked at Neji, he didn't have to deal with the din of the underneath; when he looked at Neji, it was a blissfully quiet gaze that returned his own, that never promised anything, but denied nothing.

This was one irony that both accepted. Neji was the only one who held his gaze even when he would, as the symptoms of the now-faded curse seal would have it, convulse in maddened throes during the harvest moon. Neji was the only one who cleared his reddened vision even as he was being subjected to the restraining jabs of the Hakke.

Naruto understood Sasuke's need for "silence", which was why Naruto always turned away. There was sadness in the glance, one that dissolved into a resignation (acceptance?) when they tore themselves away. Sasuke knew Naruto had his own questions. There was no need to decode Naruto, as it were; the Jinchuuriki had no Byakugan to look into the comfortable tensions that settled between the two foremost doujutsu users he knew, but he saw it, in the blind way that those with a big heart did.

They both weren't without their innermost thoughts about each other, however, and these were often triggered by the incidents of their past that would not quite go away. On the nights when deeper urges moved them, Sasuke would sometimes suffer a relapse of the incident that had happened almost a decade hence. He would feel hands unblocking passages that shot pleasant electricity up his spine, but there would be fear and hate mounting in his countenance, especially when he beheld a pursed-lipped Neji hovering over him.

On those nights Neji would hold Sasuke down, blocking the view completely, and his hair would hang down—long, long hair—to curtain and cut them off from the rest of the world. The Byakugan would glow, small moons in their own right, and it was what reflected there that gave the overall effect a chilling familiarity to Sasuke: his very own Sharingan (now spinning wildly, frantically) mirrored onto the smooth pallor of the Byakugan, making it seem as if Neji possessed the red-eyed trait; the long, long shadows would cast phantom lines across Neji's face, and Sasuke always sucked his breath in and grit his teeth.

Once, Neji thought he heard "Nii-san" escape in a hiss, before he had to apply gentle pressure on Sasuke's nape, right where the curse seal used to burn, a dark and painful mark. He avoided Sasuke for almost an entire week since, very much disquieted, before the latter demanded, with a pointed glare, that they sort it out.

On nights when there was no moon, Neji waited for the compound to quiet down before visiting the unmarked grave where his father's ashes were buried. Sasuke used to watch, from the room, and something sad and ugly would build itself up in his chest until one day, he jumped down from the eaves and quietly took his place beside a rather surprised Neji, as the latter walked the small distance to the courtyard.

Together they stood over Hizashi's buried remains, as the evening crickets chattered and the night patrol changed watch. Sasuke had leapt down from the eaves on those nights since then, and Neji came to expect his presence.

They never really talked about it, because there was nothing to talk about. They had, in their own way, lived out each other's lives: Sasuke very much reminded Neji of Hanabi, whose hot blood ran the course that competition and pressure imposed on her, and who occasionally asked her older cousin—always respectfully of course, even if she knew the secret to stretch the manji's painful claws across a Branch Member's vision—to train her with Taijutsu. Sasuke was a flawed Hanabi; and it was because of him that Neji always consented to the younger kunoichi's requests.

To Sasuke, Neji was eerily like the one other person he had fashioned his life around. When he watched Neji train with Hanabi, there would always, _always_ be that veiled, expressionless look that held a restrained longing and a guarded bitterness. When he stood beside Neji in front of his father's unmarked resting place, he thought he could feel the faintest tremors of a hatred emanating from Neji, that virtually _burst _out of his brother—a hatred for a family he was bound to serve, and a genius too objectified to be given proper acknowledgment.

When he finished off Uchiha Itachi in the deciding battle not too long hence, Sasuke had shattered his center. Much as he hated to admit it, he had always lived his life around what his older brother thought and did. Neji was _not _a replacement, but a kind of healing point, a hinge upon which he had begun to re-build his existence. Unlike Itachi, Neji didn't look at him with a guardedness that unarmed. Unlike Itachi, Neji covered up the mark of his bitterness—the Caged Bird mark that looked deceptively like a long slash across the manji, from a distance.

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It was a cool summer morning that found them both languidly fixing their shinobi utility kits. They had a mission that afternoon, a very brief and intense A-class that had to be undertaken in the utmost silence and in the cover of pure darkness. The village had several espionage experts in the field (Yamanaka Ino had lately grown in prominence among her peers), but to assign a group of jacks in lieu of a pair of aces was illogical and inefficient.

It made perfect sense to the Godaime, who secretly believed that the young men worked inexplicably well with each other, given their initially very rocky beginnings. She had assigned Sasuke (then recovering from the agonizing removal of Orochimaru's curse seal, a hazardous figure) to the protection and the monitoring of the Hyuuga house, her gut gambling on the very unlikely pair.

Her intuition, as always, was astoundingly accurate on all things except the gambling board.

They were a curious match, and from behind, a lot like inert _go_ pieces: Sasuke, his ensemble mostly black, the crest of his dead clan still stubbornly stark on his back, his hair springing to a tousled, spiky hedge as he fastened the forehead protector; Neji, mostly in white, carefully winding the bandages around his arm, aligning them to the vertical flow of his blood. He had not tied back his hair, and a lock of it slipped from where he tucked it behind his ear.

Hanabi rounded the garden, and on quiet feet, walked toward where her cousin and his partner sat on the elevated floor, and seated herself some distance beside him in a quiet gesture of permission. She swung her feet slightly and gently let her hand stray to her kunai holster; she was asking him to help her "review" for an advanced kunai-handling practical exam.

Neji hesitated, before continuing to bind his arm, at a slower pace. Beside him, Sasuke risked a short glance, which was not lost on his companion. Hanabi obviously didn't know that they were, albeit languidly, preparing for a mission; A-ranks were very confidential after all, known only among jounin-level ninja, or higher.

How strange, it seemed, this destiny was. She was ironic, and she played a nasty hand. Almost a decade ago, Sasuke remembered, he had approached his brother too, clamouring to be shuriken-trained, even while the other was carefully fastening his sandals at the threshold of their house, also preparing for a mission.

They both "heard" the plea in the child's gaze: _I want to be like you, and one day I shall become perhaps_ better _than you. For now, I wish for you to train me._ Hanabi sat rigidly, the strict training of the house she belonged to apparent in every little movement of her hand, of her eyes. She waited.

"Only for a short while," Neji's voice broke the silence, and brought Sasuke back to the present. Neji didn't even turn his head towards Hanabi's direction; he continued to wind the white cloth over the upper length of his arm, taking care to make the layers slightly overlap one another.

But that was enough for the fiery little Hyuuga. Eyes widening in a barely suppressed expression of joy, she merely nodded in the perfect impression of a formal request and walked back around to where she had come from. Her proud lift of the chin was very much there, but so was the apparent admiration that she held for her cousin; despite the things she had heard about him from the Elders and from her father, she wanted very much to become like her Neji-niisan.

Neji followed her movement through the walls of the house, seeing her perch herself in position on the training ground. He deliberately finished his bandaging, and pulled back his hair, before standing and picking up three kunai to train with.

"The…mission."

There was a very light tug on his sleeve, but it was enough to arrest Neji completely. It was an excuse, but a lame one, they both knew; underneath the underneath, it clearly said, _wait_.

Sasuke didn't know what made him do it. Perhaps it was the sight of someone's back walking away from him that reminded him of some long-ago memory that shamelessly returned. It was also a bright summer morning, back then, and he too had a bit of time in his hands.

But Neji was Neji. And he knew why Sasuke had pulled him back, in a limp but measured grip—knew and understood more completely than Sasuke cared to admit for himself. What had happened, happened, and shaped what they had become now. And the "now" that they shared was comfortable, was quiet, and was all they thought they never wanted. A little reminder of the past was small price; they allowed each other their moments of uncertainty.

"I said only for a short while," Neji repeated, allowing a bit of amusement to creep into his tone. A smile hovered about the edge of his mouth when he was met with a slightly bratty little glare for his remark. Ah, that was one trait the Uchiha were also known for—stubbornness and impatience. So he brought two fingers up and gently poked Sasuke on the forehead—right where the manji would be if the latter had been a Hyuuga, and right where the Konoha crest on his forehead protector would have been scratched across—pushing him away and loosening the grip on his sleeve.

Sasuke watched as Neji rounded he garden, to meet with his little cousin. He watched, but he _dared_ not smile (although it was strangely difficult _not_ to), the irony of the moment dissipating to a strange and amorphous joy the kind of which he had forgotten how to bear for quite some time now.

It exhilarated him. It frightened him, a little. A part of him still thought that he deserved no such joy. The fingers on his forehead had not been accidental, and because Neji was Neji, he had of course touched a nerve that sent a strange shiver down Sasuke's spine and that, despite his best efforts to seat himself properly, made itself known every other second or so.

"Damned Hyuuga," he snarled weakly under his breath, letting the smile, that had (much like himself) squirmed under his serious mien escape soundlessly in the upward curve of his mouth.


	2. Cut 2

**Perfect Blindness**

_**These Silences Story 3**_

- the 2nd story of a series I'm planning involving a singular theme, each featuring various pairings I happen to favor. I don't own Naruto, but I have shamelessly borrowed Kishimoto Masashi's characters, and at times liberally added some of my own little concoctions.

- this story contains implied **_yaoi_**, and if you are uncomfortable with this, please do us both a favor and stay away. I shall also be alluding to a lot of other works, which are duly credited at the end of this long one-shot. This is set ideally after the series is over, to which I would daresay is, for now, an AU, precisely because it hasn't ended yet. ; And I'm making my own conclusions, literally, but that's not exactly the point.

- set several years after the current things that are going on. Neji x Sasuke. **_SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS_**, please take heed, **especially if you don't read, or are not up-to-date with the manga.** If it doesn't matter, yey for you. :)

* * *

.

I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like moulten lead.

. - from _King Lear_, 4.7

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.

. - from _King Lear_, 5.3

* * *

It was a very brief, but very taxing A-class mission.

You hear him exhale softly between his teeth, slow but heavy, a pant tempered into a whisper. You see him blink sporadically every so often and you frown, seeing the energy systems that carried chakra to his eyes pulse in irregularity that must have been quite painful—hence the telltale pain-tears on the sides of his eyes.

The Mangetsu did not come easily, and did not allow itself to be used without due payment.

You weren't in such good shape either, but you carried your broken arm with dignity, even as it pulsed disjointedly across your chest where you strapped it, a thing of yourself but _not_ of yourself. You've had worse, you've had worse. In times like these you liked reminding yourself of the arrow-holes that cut through your shoulder and side, and how you were still very much a genin at _that _time.

This was nothing, this was nothing; in the morning, or perhaps if one of them still was awake, you could simply ask one of the House medics to fuse the strained tendons and the fissured bones. It would be good as new. Its dull throb was something you could tuck away to the back of your head until the morning.

You don't want to say it, not even to yourself, but _his_ pain concerns you.

You know how the Mangekyou allowed for genjutsu of such high levels, forcing an acute state of astigmatism on its user in the long run. You also know how the Mangetsu, its shuriken-shaped wheel differing in contours from that of the Mangekyou, didn't quite induce the humiliating myopia of its brother-Sharingan.

Sasuke turns away from you, as if on cue, knowing what you are thinking when you shift your white-eyed gaze like _that_; the Uchiha are an obstinately proud lot, even at their own expense, and he turns his head away because he doesn't want you to see him wrinkle his brow an effort to ease away the sting of the aftereffect.

You know how the Mangetsu stole its user's vision entirely, the more it was employed, and the more painful it was after being used in a given situation.

Lately, the pain-tears had been more recurring, but he always dismisses it as dust in his eyes or the dryness of the air, but he doesn't know you know.

You know that the pain it extracted from its wielder must be like the pain of a Chidori spreading its fine blue wings across Sasuke's brain, enfolding in its electric feathers the vision that had served him for nearly two decades. It flapped every now and then, sending bursts of ill-controlled chakra into already worn-out optic nerves.

Chi-dori. The call of a thousand birds.

Its sound reverberated in your ears, in the silence of the village at night, much like white noise. As you both make your way to the Hyuuga estates, the darkened houses that flank the street seem to peer invisibly out at you. Like empty sockets, open windows array in quiet scrutiny, inviting the scarce summer wind to cool a sweat-twisted sheet or a slumbering shinobi's fevered sleep. It was strange how such populated places could feel just as haunted as any ghost town, as any family compound perhaps, long deserted by its deceased clan.

Both of you are a sorry sight, but both of you, proud sons of proud clans, carry your pain like a badge. There will be aching ribs and sore limbs in the morning (severe headaches for Sasuke that would perhaps last a day), but the mission was accomplished; the last mutinous Root ANBU pair had been detained and were scheduled for trial when the sun climbed the sky.

He staggers, but you anticipate the movement, seeing the growing wobble of his knees, the short shocks of stillness in his muscles, as if these were little moments of unconsciousness. You reach forward with your good arm, naturally straining your left, and prop him upright back again.

He glares at you, but that is reflex and he's probably only delirious. "I can walk," he mumbles, but adjusts his weight slightly against your shoulder anyway, and together the both of you make your way up the hill, your leaning forms casting one long shadow against a moonlit street.

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The world, it seems, has slowed down to a crawl.

You lay him on the futon, face already drenched in sweat. The wind that wafted in to nudge to feeble life the small chime by the sill, seemed to hold its very self back. His face is contorted in an expression that could have meant pain, and perhaps something else…something else that only _you_ have seen, in the secret hours of your passing. It was fascinating how such a scornful face could twist to a look that was as much agony as pleasure.

Ah, but now is not the time. Not now, when he was dealing with the backlash of the Sharingan. You decide to tell him, by holding a cool hand to his forehead, how unamused you are by his pain, and how he should not keep on volunteering himself with you on your one-person missions because whenever he did, he always seemed to end up using the Mangetsu, and the Mangetsu…

He snarls lightly, but mostly in reaction to a particularly sharp jolt of pain. You move your hand lower, to cover his eyes. He tries to turn his head away (he was good at this), but you hold him firmly.

He stills, but his breath hitches. Between your hand and his eyes, both of you could feel the flow of chakra, yours entering his, smoothening out the strained pathways that contorted and contracted around the areas of his eyes.

"I—" he begins, but you silence him, because you know what he will say: He will wish he did not have the Sharingan, he will wish he was not born to his clan, he will wish that he were blind. He has said these things before, and always, he never truly meant them. All your lives, you realize, both of you have said so many things you did not mean. All your lives you hurtled blindly, you, proud sons of clans whose eyes see what common eyes do not.

But who can see beyond what is mortal? Certainly not you, no matter how well you thought you could anticipate "destiny" and the way it moved you, both of you, like pieces on a gameboard. You lived in a square, in a cage, of your own intricate construction, and your belief in a fixed future was a spotlight you relied on; a spotlight so bright that it blinded you.

He moved in shadows, patches of darkness as circular as the wheels in his eyes, repeating in his mind what had happened on that night. Again and again, spinning, clouding his vision to the present, blinding him.

This is the irony you both understand, and this is the irony that keeps you together; two pieces in a _go _board, defining each other, he outlining your shadows, you clearing his sight. You will lean on each other and you will feel, as you feel now, the wetness brimming from his lids as you close your hands over his eyes, as you pour in the last of your strength to combat the stubborn knots in his chakra pathways (everything about the Uchiha is stubborn).

Your left arm sags against your chest where you strapped it across your shoulder with bandages. You recall the dried gauze pressed to the gash on your side, when the ponytailed Root tried to halve you with a sharpened jur, the same side that the spider-mutant burned a hole through. You recall your soft tap to your opponent's nape—the one place where the Byakugan fails—and his body falling and convulsing at your feet.

You recall _Sasuke's _left hand singing, and cutting through the darkness of the underground tunnel, electric blue, furious, eyes turning in the wheels that would one day turn him blind. That would one day, like your Branch House mark, remove the ability to see movement, and see through illusions.

You lay yourself down beside him, remembering that you have a body too, and your chakra is expendable, and for the moment sleep is a wise and heavy hand weighing on your eyelids, telling you to rest, _you equally arrogant and overconfident Hyuuga!_

Outside, you can vaguely see the three members of the Eastern Sector patrol leaping across the perimeter of your compound. You see the slow turning of the world as it moved, as it always did, from evening to day. By then, the second morning watch will take its place, and the streets will fill with life. By then the village's eyes will open, like it was the first morning of their lives. By then the children will make their way to school, and Hanabi will toss her head proudly when the teachers tell her that she is to be accelerated a grade. By then they will release the kites, the "Hyuuga's flock," the fastest birds in the whole of Konoha.

By then the house medics will tap lightly on your door to waken you, and they will have their medical implements ready, and they will mend your arm and wonder why you are so _spent_. By then he too will open his eyes and the tiniest fear nudges against you: that when you look into them, they will not be able to look back at you because the wheels have worn his vision out.

You wonder if his blindness will be, finally, a vast expanse of white, a whiteness that no shadow can possibly penetrate. You wonder if the Caged Bird mark will leave you, in your final moments, in darkness as gentle and as quiet as his stare, especially in the mornings when you are languidly preparing your tools for war, or in the evenings when you would bend over him, and he would raise his head to meet yours.

A darkness as soft as his hair on your cheek and as deep as his eyes when the Mangetsu leaves them seeps across your consciousness.

You fall asleep to the sound of a thousand feathers winging their way to the sun.

* * *

**Notes:**

An amazing thing about NejiSasu is how _fitting_ they seem to be on closer scrutiny (ahahaha. Insert doujutsu joke here). Sure if they got together all the villagers, girls and guys alike, would probably drown the country in drool—both in appreciation, and in jealousy, and possibly even in rabid anger. But then… The pretty dichotomy of white/black, the image of birds (Itachi's form in Chapter 259 of the _manga _dispels into black birds, ala Madonna), the idea of 'looking', their birthdays being only 20 days and a year from each other… bah, I couldn't resist.

1 Chidori – "One Thousand Birds" It's pretty much the same as "Raikiri" but it's more associated with Kakashi (even if Chidori's the original name), because according to Gai (and we all know he's a walking Wikipedia ;D), it was the latter who split a lighting bolt in two with it.

2 _Mangetsu_- literally, "full moon." I took liberties with the idea that there could be more than one manifestation of a "higher" Sharingan, Mangekyou (lit. "kaleidoscope," Itachi) only being one of them. I'd imagine it would take a toll on the user as well, and I modified the conditions a little.

3 "Harvest Moon" – typically in September, meaning Sasuke gets his crazy fits once a year. It's like the culminative amount of pain he's had to experience via the usage of his Mangetsu for one year. This is the true reason why he's kept in Hyuuga (ergo Neji) custody, because like 4-tailed Naruto, he can go insane and do an Itachi. The Hokage doesn't want that, so she rightfully assigns the strongest family to watch him.

4 _go_ – _the _Game. Unlike chess, the squares are not coloured, but the pieces are. The play pieces themselves are generally in black and white. I'd say something about "Sai" but it's the wrong _manga _series and all you get is the image of man-stomach and incredibly fashionable shinobi-midriffs.

5 These being the 3rd in my "Silences" project, I decided to tackle the "silence" of a gaze—much synesthesia there, but you know how, without saying anything, some people have an "inquisitive" or "meaningful" look that they might as well have articulated anyway. Neji and Sasuke, I believe, would be extremely in-tune with this "Underneath the underneath" sort of conversation.

6 For Shichi-chan.

7 (... Fk you, Billy Shakespeare rocks. ;p)


End file.
